


Weightless

by NatMatryoshka



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drinking, Explicit Language, F/M, Headcanon: Laura is Essie's reincarnation, It's Laura and Sweeney after all, Lube, Masturbation, Or maybe a relative who knows, Road Trips, Sex, Smoking, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 09:17:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11688633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NatMatryoshka/pseuds/NatMatryoshka
Summary: She's an empty body now. Maybe all that she wants is to feel something.[A retelling of "Because the night belongs to us".]





	Weightless

Probably, the part of her old life Laura misses the most is sleeping.

 

She never thought about it before: she was never the type of person who considers sleeping a sort of hobby and loves it with a passion. But now her nights are empty and endless: sleep would be the only solution to erase all of her thoughts. Her fate must hate her.

She misses all those weightless, little actions filling her days one after another, simple and apparently insignificant but capable of keeping her mind busy: going to work, closing the door behind her back. Feeding the cat. Coming back home, cooking herself something for dinner while a TV host explained the rules of a trivia game, laying on the sofa and staring at the screen. Moving the shower faucet to warm the water up. Turning the light off on her bedside table and waiting for sleep to come, eyes pointed on the ceiling, while vague thoughts and colorless impressions from that day piled up behind her eyelids, helping to close them.  Ordinary days, one similar to the other, but after a week in her new undead state, she realizes how much she missed that routine. How every single, colorless day was part of her being.

The sun sets again, every day some minutes after the day before: spring comes forth. Since that big Irishman came to her to take his coin back and they decided to leave with Salim-not-Salim’s taxi to cross the country, she feels part of an absurd fantasy movie, a series of bizarre events starting with her car accident and continuing with gods, Jinns, leprechauns who drive and smoke, going around through the streets and motels. An incredible bunch of absurdities she just can’t make go away by just waving a hand and pretend they never existed. Absurd like her rotten body, an arm tied to her body with a black thread, sewn with great care by those two strange men who called themselves Ibis and Jaquel. Her skin painted again to seem new, eyes more and more opaque. She can’t drink or eat, all she can do is smoke a cigarette after another and look at the vapor disappear, going down between her useless lungs and then coming out her lips in thin strands. Even if the tar might cover them, it wouldn’t be any worse than that.

 

Salim keeps driving. He stops at sunset to pray, taking a small carpet off the trunk: the sun gently caresses his back. His litany fills the air and suddenly it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t matter anymore to him: there are only himself and God and his prayers slip out of his mouth, dried by the hot wind that starts to blow, slightly touching disinterested customers who drink coffee and stop at the gas station. Salim loses himself in his little, personal world forgetting about everything else, while the Irishman goes to the toilette and buys more cigarettes and beer and Laura sits on a garbage can, legs dangling, her head trying to travel as far as possible from there, to avoid looking at the tiny scars on her arms that will never heal. She observes her nails and for a moment feels nostalgic about her nail polish. Opening the small vial, breathing its chemical scent for a moment, then coloring her nails and shaking a hand in the air to dry it. Then putting it back on the bathroom’s shelf. Can you feel _nostalgic_ about a bloody nail polish vial?

 

Laura shakes her head. Truth is she really misses life above everything, but she just can’t fully admit it to herself.

 

Once his prayer has finished, Salim comes back to the taxi. Sweeney left the shop with a beer can but he doesn’t join the other man: he stretches his legs around throwing glances, gives Laura some more time to explore the grassy area near the parking, where a cat reaches her. He seems happy to see the girl and allows Laura to caress his back, like she wasn’t a moving corpse but a real person, made of flesh and blood, warm. Her cat said goodbye to her in his own way too whenever she left home, and when she came back he was always waiting on her sofa, as someone who had kept an eye on the house during her absence. Until she found him dead, and she stood still for a couple of minutes, caressing his fur, searching for something to feel. Maybe anger because fate was taking away the only creature who really loved her, along with Shadow. Maybe annoyance, because a part of her sacred daily routine had been torn apart from her. The cat purrs, pats on her hand to encourage her, and Laura can’t help but smiling.

 She hears Sweeney reach her, but she doesn’t leave her place. He stops to look at her, probably doesn’t notice the smile on her lips, for his tone is ironic, like he sensed a change in her mood.

 

“Would ya fancy taking him away with you, Dead Wife? Mind he doesn’t eat your hand.”

 She caresses the cat one last time to say goodbye, then she stands up and looks at him walking away with his trotting pace. Perhaps he has a family somewhere, he can be a family cat who likes to walk around new places, far from his humans. She throws Sweeney an oblique glance: there’s no use in telling him the whole story, he wouldn’t understand.

 “Once I had a cat” the girl reaches the taxi, turning her back against the man. Laura tries to control her voice, but something cracks inside herself. “He died years ago.”

 The taxi leaves in the pink and orange dusk light, under clouds becoming thinner, moved by a gentle wind that plays with her hair. It will probably rain.

 

 

 

*

 

 

When the night falls and a second-rate motel becomes the only safe place to sleep, killing time becomes more and more difficult.

Salim goes early to bed, probably because he doesn’t want to bear Ginger Minge and his stupid jokes: he eats something, prays and then comes to his room, three actions he repeats everytime they stop in a motel. Actually Sweeney doesn’t even pay attention to him anymore, he prefers to get drunk as much as he can before going to bed, as – Laura suspects – he probably always did until they met. So she finds herself alone, in the middle of an impersonal room, to face the thoughts filling her mind that always seem to overwhelm her.

She misses Shadow. She misses his smile, the way he made her feel special with only a word. She misses sex. She misses all those things she used to look at from a distance like they weren’t part of her life, only momentary distractions to make her feel something, to fill her days with some sort of meaning. If she had only thought for a moment to be currently living in a _privileged_ condition, with a body ripped off from death and thrown on the Earth again for some joke of her fate, but capable of living again and enjoying a new life, now everything seems crazy, senseless to her. Her opaque eyes say so, her cold skin, flies always around her. What did Sweeney say? Her body will fall to pieces and finally he will get his fucking coin back. The one Shadow gave to her, the one that moves her body like a puppet with its invisible strings. Ginger Minge’s lucky coin.

She can’t breathe, and even if it’s only an unconscious effect she leaves the room in a hurry, letting the air rearrange her thoughts. When she was with Shadow, sex was a great way to erase her thoughts: when they finished she always fell asleep, a wonderful oblivion that seemed concrete, human. _Pleasure._ Boredom came back the night after, but at least for some hours her mind gave her a break. And now?

She keeps smoking. After finishing her cigarette, she throws it on the ground and splats it with a heel spreading ashes around. As a force bigger than her was pushing her body forth, Laura walks big steps to reach the gas station, where a group of vending machines wait for customers in a neon light aura, cold and professional. She rummages in her pockets and buys another packet of cigarettes with a few coins, then moves her head towards a small, red machine, greeted by a series of posters of beautiful and naked women stacked to both sides. After pushing some buttons, a blue bottle falls down: luckily, they still have some lube to sell.  

If that situation was normal for her, she would laugh until her stomach aches. Laura Moon, going to the Ginger Minge for some sex! Waiting for him in his room in the dead of night with a bottle of lube and asking him to fuck! It sounds so exquisitely desperate and sleazy, and desperation is the only thing that makes her feel _alive._ So she crosses the street, comes back to the motel and enters Sweeney’s room, after opening his door with a neat push. _I have no choice_ , she says to herself like a sort of mantra to justify herself, as if she really needs a defense. She wants to feel something. Disgust. Desire. Shame. Pleasure. _Anything_ , as long as she can free herself from that state of uncertainty, where confusion and annoyance are mixed together. 

After a while, Sweeney returns, blind drunk. He smells of whiskey and cigarettes smoked out of despair, a desperation similar to hers, but she doesn’t bat an eyelid. Laura simply undresses her body, stopping him before he can say something. She shows him the way she wants to be fucked, and for a moment she enjoys the warmth of his thighs against hers, the grip of his hands on her waist, and she feels almost guilty. She lets him fuck her without looking into his eyes like she did with Shadow, bending her body to every thrust, small whimpers of pleasure coming out her lips. She allows him to take care of her with the lube (with too much care, wetting a good half of the bed) and she has to repress a wild laughter again, not to shake her body from head to toe. He can grab her tits and play with her nipples to look for more pleasure, why should she care? Laura waits for him to come between moans, his semen all over her thighs, she lets him fall in a heap of bones and worn-out muscles while he tries not to crush her. She inhales deeply and turns her back against him, embracing the feeling that’s slowing filling her loins and doesn’t seem to fade, their sex angrily consumed. She did it. Next to her, the ginger lies on his back in the aftermath of his orgasm, alone, breathing deeply as well. If she’d turn, if she’d see him vulnerable in a so private moment, she’s sure the sight of him would never abandon her mind.

“Fancied the ride, Dead Wife? What ya say?” he asks her in a hoarse voice, but he doesn’t touch her shoulder or, even worse, tries to hug her to make their contact last. He remains behind her and those two sentences lingers in the air like a voiceover spoke them, someone unrelated to that situation. After a while he falls asleep and Laura stares at the wall, where a beam of moonlight tries to sketch some vague lines. Then she lies on her back too and looks at the ceiling, always careful not to wake him up, and a woman’s face shifts through her mind, a daydream that freezes her. Her hair is red and curly, her face small and rounded, her cheeks and nose covered by a multitude of freckles, wandering brown stars. She wears a white bonnet, clothes from another century. She looks at herself on a copper tray absentmindedly, like she doesn’t care much about her reflection, after all. She diverts her eyes from the tray and looks at her: her stare is so piercing Laura immediately shuts her eyes.

When she finally opens them up, the girl has disappeared. Laura stands up and leaves the room silently, leaving the sleeping leprechaun behind.

 

 

*

 

 

 The day after, Laura acts like nothing has changed: her attitude towards Sweeney is always the same. Why would she change? What hides inside her was always her propriety. She didn’t even let Shadow – his husband, his _puppy_ – look at her true self, if she really could call her empty shell “true self”… she simply can’t open her heart to a stranger fell out of the sky to her. She throws him the same evil eye, threatens him when he fights with Salim, gets in and off the car. But when she’s sure they can’t see her, she throws him a different type of glance. In her mind he lies behind her and pants softly, stark naked, his chest going up and down. She feels so powerful for a moment, so much it almost intoxicates her.

Salim goes to his room two hours after the sun has set. Sweeney smiles at her, does the same, she keeps on wandering. Looks at everything surrounding her, walks back and forth like a caged lion while cigarette stubs pile around her feet, while she blows out rings of pale smoke and cars on the street runs with their stereos on, a faint echo that barely touches her ears. She doesn’t want to sit down and look at the night sky like she has always done: the fear of seeing again that red-haired woman is a mischievous pin against her skin. Laura walks away. She lives mechanically, if you can call “life” a state of suspension where you are yourself and not yourself anymore at the same time.

The same force that brought her forth the evening before grabs her again, makes her steps change direction. She leans against the Irishman room’s door, finding it open, much to her surprise. Again she asks him something and gives herself in return, again she undresses and waits for him to place his body behind her thighs to fuck her once more. Laura closes her eyes: she’s so powerful, like she’s holding his life in the palm of her hand, the life of a thousand-year old creature who searches for a hint of pleasure in a tortured body, covered in scars. He seems gentler than the night before, but maybe he’s only less drunk. She grits her teeth, holding back a moan because she doesn’t want him to find out she’s enjoying the moment, after all. Once they’ve finished, she can’t help but listen to him breathing next to her, tired and still: perhaps it’s the only chance she has to avoid the red-haired girl behind her eyelids. She has to focus on her fake breathe, on two lungs growing larger and then getting smaller without a real purpose, and wait. Wait again.

Sweeney falls asleep. Laura disappears into the night: it’s always the best thing she can do. Simple like ripping off a band-aid, less problematic. No useless questions, or meaningless answers.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 Sometimes she asks herself what that journey really means to her.

It’s her love for Shadow that’s guiding her way? Yeah, it _has_ to be: she took him for granted once, promised to wait his return only to follow Robbie and his worthless promise of distraction, some unimportant sex to fill her banal days that destroyed everything. Now she has a second chance, she simply can’t let things be. She mustn’t. Yet Shadow answered her with a sad smile, and in a moment her world fell apart. Then, why is she travelling towards him anyway?

Perhaps because she’s stubborn. Because she wants to change, now that she can’t come back to the girl she was. Because since something has ripped her from the night she fell into, from Jaquel’s dark, grim voice, she feels her life violently flow through her veins. It’s like she can’t stop: she has to be quicker than time passing by, she must cheat it. Reach Shadow before her skin can rot, before putrefaction may prevail upon her and prevent her movements. Run, fly through the streets chasing a golden light always far from her, when a resurrection seems totally impossible.

During the day, Laura tries to hope. When night falls, she finds herself in the leprechaun’s bed, closes her eyes and imagines her husband behind her. Sometimes she doesn’t succeed, and it’s only after some minutes that she feels guilty.

Sometimes she asks herself if Shadow would ever change his mind. If he might ever want her back in his life. Laura shakes her head, a gesture that’s nothing more than a nervous tic. The ginger told her a few days before, while drinking his Southern Comfort with Cola: _you can love somebody even when you know they don't like it. Even when you know they don't want it._ He added a sexual figure of speech trying to shame her, then a sarcastic grin, poor one. But what’s the sense in dragging along an unrequited feeling only to give her useless life a sort of turning point? She throws another cigarette away. Who knows if Sweeney was talking about himself.  


 

 

*

 

 

 She would never admit it, but when his hands rest on her back she almost feels her skin tremble. It’s unnatural – her body is dead, she can’t feel anything – but she eagerly waits for his touch, those rough fingers first on her hipbone and then on her buttocks, opening her legs wide. He wears a ring, cold metal pressed on her skin, she hears the faint sound of his trousers’ zip: the first night he let a moan out while working on his cock to make it hard, alcohol didn’t help him. From the second night on, he didn’t need his hand anymore.

It’s the third time she enters his room and grabs him by his shirt, looking him in the eyes: the first night she only wanted to wring what she desperately needed out of him, but that sensation of necessity became something different in two nights. Something without a name, almost scary. She avoids thinking about it: she takes her clothes off and kneels down on the mattress, her legs sinking, hands wide open: she waits to feel the metal ring on her skin and then his hoarse moans, his voice trembling while he thrusts into her body again and again… but Sweeney holds her tight, then turns Laura and looks at her face. His eyes are full of hope, so _sweet_ she’s confused.

“Don’t do it, Essie. Don’t turn your back.”

Red locks come forth in her eyesight, brown eyes glowing in the dark like cat ones. An old woman’s voice told her stories about fairies and pookas, and the girl she was, listened at her for hours. _When did you lose the magic, Laura?_ the curly woman asks, hiding the pendant that ruined her life in her neckline. _Why did you stop believing?_

Laura holds her breath. It’s her aggressive side that speaks up, the one used to shield itself from the world.

 

“What? Who the hell is Essie?”

 She’s asking it, but she’s afraid she already knows the answer.

Laura bends her head, probably to look at him and check if he’s drunk or not, neon lights caress her skin and make every laceration more visible, scars like huge lunar craters. He takes her by the hips, making her straddle on top of him and seeming almost indecisive, as his mind’s creating some sort of explanation at the speed of light. In the end, he chooses some words.

“No one”. A silent moment, then he adds: “what if I want to look at your face while we’re fucking, Dead Wife?”

Why does he have to make something _so damn simple_ as mindless sex so complicated? Why? She would almost want to punch him and then cry out of anger, if her body wasn’t as dry as an autumn leaf, if she’d really remember how to do it. But she can’t, she can only answer him while she’s sitting on his legs.

“It wasn’t part of the deal”. She curves her lips in a glower. He moves his hand, a vague gesture that matches his words.

“Ah, what deal? We didn’t mention any deal. Keeping us company during our cold nights on the road sounds like a deal to ya?”

 

He’s right. She can only take her pleasure onto his legs, right against his skin. From there she can notice every little detail of his face: she can count the freckles on his cheeks, touch the scars on his eyebrows, on his cheekbones. His lean yet muscular chest with a little bunch of red hair scattered around, other freckles on his arms, abdomen, stomach. His red beard that would tickle her skin if he’d only lower his head between her legs and start _devouring her_ from there. His green and brown eyes look at her, she’d probably blush if her blood was still running through her veins, who knows? She waits for him to take care of her body like he did before with the lube, then she starts with her messy dance without looking at him, lips sealed to hold moans behind as much as she can, until some of them succeed in escaping from her lips and mix with Sweeney’s ones, with the gentle creaking of their bed. _Yes, yes._

He lays his head on her chest gently, before she can notice anything. Sweeney lifts his face and their eyes meet right when time seems to freeze and they don’t know what to do, if it would be better to stand still and keep on looking or go on, reach the climax and let it die with the end of that night, in the breeze that caresses road signals and trees, making the leaves move. Before she can decide, she looks at his face. Looks at his freckles, his squinted eyes, the interrupted breath that matches her frantic movements, his red hair she really wants to touch, and the sweat drops on his chest, the soft line of his beard. The scar something sharp dug on his forehead, and suddenly she’d desperately like to know what or who did it, ask him about, listen to his Irish accent and cling herself to it, to the feeling of his cold ring on her thighs, and then…

When their eyes meet Sweeney smiles and holds her tighter, as he understood she’s gone too far and he was happy, extremely and stupidly happy. He sinks his finger in the flesh of her thighs, not afraid of taking her apart with only the pressure of his fingertips, pushes her against his body, supports her agitated movements and takes her to the climax like he never did before, with an intensity that entirely shakes her tiny body. Laura squeezes her eyes, a louder moan escaping from her lips and echoing through the room… until the end, when Sweeney lays her on the bed to make her recover. They both recover, together this time, and Laura simply can’t leave the room after staring at the wall for no reason. Thighs covered with his semen, she breathes out of habit, her lungs move while her eyes can’t help but move around the room. For a small, infinitesimal second, she feels good. She doesn’t know why.

She doesn’t refuse his hand lightly touching her back and then resting onto it: she just waits for him to fall asleep, his breathe more and more regular like a serene, sleeping child. She doesn’t move even when Sweeney, still asleep, comes closer to her. Laura smiles a bit and turns her body, until her nose is at the same height of his and once more she can count all the freckles on his cheeks, count the scars and imagine the story behind them by herself. Who knows if he’s happy. What does she feel?

 

If anyone who didn’t know them would have entered the room, they would mistake them for two young lovers felt asleep after a night of love. The thought doesn’t bother her.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 Voices.

Voices everywhere, whispers, broken words that fill the mist around her. An angry one shouts sentences in a language she doesn’t understand, others, the smallest ones, sigh and laugh, some others seems almost compassionate, a group of them mock her. _What do you want from me? Stop. Shut up. Stop, please._ It’s like they wanted to take her soul back, the one that was ripped from them with a trick, thanks to a golden shard coming from the past to a more suitable owner. _You don’t belong to the Earth anymore, Laura Moon. Give us back what’s ours. How long will you deceive yourself?_

The moment before she was driving the ice cream truck along the road, the one after a rabbit rushed right under the wheels and the world turned upside down with a bang. Pitch black, cold. The last image she remembers is Ginger Minge’s face that comically hit the window, then rolled with her in a mess of broken glass and ice creams falling in every direction. Then, nothing. Only cold. Colder than she usually feels.

 

_Ah, fuck!_

 

Until something pusher her away from the limbo where she found herself, but this time it’s not Mr. Jaquel, Anubi’s not there to scold her for her insolence: a warm sensation wraps her heart and gives her the strength to make life flow again inside her veins. A small but strong push, and she lies on the concrete with the skin of her torso all open, ripped apart like a doll lacerated by a savage dog. _Shadow?_   All of a sudden she catches her breath. Her eyesight completely embraces Sweeney’s big shape, his hands touching what remains of her breasts, maybe trying to put the skin together again.

Laura punches him, making his body collapse on the ground. She hears him grunt, covering his nose with a hand, while she regains her strength and covers her chest with the ripped pieces of her grey t-shirt. _Shit, shit!_ she curses between her teeth, looking at the disaster around her. 

Once she’s back on the ice cream truck, a red jacket helping her cover the mess of her body, she feels a bit sorry for hitting him that way. He probably only wanted to help her. The incident left something in his eyes, but she can’t understand what. Relief? Concern about her now open wounds? She doesn’t know. She teases him honking, and the look he throws at her surprises Laura: he’s almost… tender. He seems happy to see her walking again, distraught by something he doesn’t say, maybe hopeful. She stares at him, then he gets on the truck without a word, that melancholic shade always on his face.

They leave in silence and Laura wonders if something has changed between them. If those nights brought between them something bigger and unexpected, a gift they just can’t refuse.

 

She wonders if it’s too late to come back.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This story was born thanks to Carola_dl's comment: it's the first time I write a story from another character's POV, but it was quite interesting. I really hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did!  
> Thanks for all your love, kudos and support to my previous Madwife work: it's amazing to see how many nice people you meet thanks to something you love. American Gods is one of my favourite books (and Tv shows!), to be able to touch so many people with a simple story was simply great <3  
> (And thank you, bae Ailisea, for being my sweet and talented beta-reader!)


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